President Barack Obama announced [in December, 2014] that the U.S.
would normalize relations with the island's Communist government and open a
U.S. embassy sometime next year.

In an interview with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Thursday,
Johnson says policy change won't impact immigration rules for now. He added
that Cubans should not to try to come to the U.S. illegally.

Under current law Cubans who make it to U.S. soil, by sea or
land, are generally allowed to permanently stay in the country under the
so-called "wet foot, dry foot" policy. Most other immigrants face
deportation if caught trying to sneak into the country.”

Article by George Will, Columnist wrote an intriguing article on the subject.

George Will: "Cuba Derangement Syndrome

Barack Obama has made a geopolitical irrelevancy suddenly
relevant to American presidential politics. For decades, Cuba has been
instructive as a museum of two stark failures: socialism and the U.S. embargo.
Now, Cuba has become useful as a clarifier of different Republican flavors of
foreign-policy thinking.

The permanent embargo was imposed in 1962 in the hope of
achieving, among other things, regime change. Well. Fidel Castro, 88, has not been seen in public since January
and may be even more mentally diminished than anyone — including his 83-year
old brother — who still adheres to Marxism. Whatever Fidel's condition,
however, Cuba has been governed by the Castros during 11 U.S. presidencies, and
for more years than the Soviet Union dominated Eastern Europe. Regime change —
even significant regime modification — has not happened in Havana.

Some conservative criticisms of Obama's new Cuba policy —
which includes normalizing diplomatic and commercial relations, to the extent
that presidential action can — seem reflexive. They look symptomatic of Cold
War Nostalgia and 1930s Envy — yearnings for the moral clarity of the struggle
with the totalitarians. Cuba's regime, although totalitarian, no longer matters
in international politics. As bankrupt morally as it is economically, the
regime is intellectually preposterous and an enticing model only for people who
want to live where there are lots of 1950s Chevrolets.

Eleven million Cubans, however, matter. Obama's new policy
is defensible if it will improve their political conditions by insinuating into
Cuba economic and cultural forces that will be subversive of tyranny.

Sen. Rand Paul, a potential Republican presidential
candidate, evidently considers this hope highly probable. He is correct to
support giving it a try. But he may not understand how many times such wishes
have fathered the thought that commerce can pacify the world. In 1910, 40
peaceful European years after the Franco-Prussian War, Norman Angell's book
"The Great Illusion" became an international best-seller by arguing
that war between developed industrial countries would be prohibitively
expensive, hence futile, hence unlikely. Soon Europe stumbled into what was,
essentially, a 30-year war.

Angell's theory was an early version of what foreign-policy
analyst James Mann calls "the Starbucks fallacy," the theory that
when people become accustomed to a plurality of coffee choices, they will
successfully demand political pluralism. We are sadder but wiser now that this
theory has been wounded, if not slain, by facts, two of which are China and
Vietnam. Both combine relatively open economic systems with political systems
that remain resolutely closed.

Sen. Marco Rubio, a potential 2016 rival of Paul's, is
properly disgusted that Obama, in striking his deal with Cuba, accomplished
disgracefully little for the country's breathtakingly brave democracy
advocates. There are two reasons for questioning whether Obama really tried.

First, he is generally congruent with, and partly a product
of, academic leftism. Hence, he might be tinged with the sentimentalism that
has made Cuba a destination for political pilgrims too ideologically blinkered
to see the extraordinary sadism of Cuba's treatment of its many political
prisoners.

Second, Obama is so phobic about George W. Bush's miscarried
"regime change" in Iraq, that he cannot embrace, or at least
enunciate, a regime change policy toward Cuba. Regime change, however, must be,
at bottom, the justification for his new approach.

Cuba Derangement Syndrome (CDS), a recurring fever,
accounted for the Bay of Pigs calamity, the most feckless use of U.S. power ever.
After this, the Kennedys, President John and Attorney General Robert, continued
to encourage harebrained attempts to destabilize Cuba and assassinate its
leader.

Today, CDS afflicts those who, like Rubio, charge that U.S.
diplomatic relations and economic interactions "lead to legitimizing"
Cuba's regime. America's doctrine about legitimacy has been clear since the
Declaration of Independence: Governments derive their "just powers"
from the consent of the governed. America has diplomatic and commercial
relations with many regimes that are realities even though they flunk our
legitimacy test.

Twenty-three years after Cuba ceased being a Soviet satellite,
there is no compelling, or even coherent, argument for why Cuba, among all the
world's repulsive regimes, should be the object of a U.S. policy whose
rationale is to express the obvious — U.S. distaste.

What makes Rubio uncharacteristically shrill, saying Paul
has "no idea what he's talking about"? And what makes Paul too clever
by half when saying Rubio wants to "retreat to our borders" and hence
is an "isolationist"? CDS does this. As they brawl about Cuba, a
geopolitical irrelevancy, neither seems presidential.